Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.\n
A World War II landing craft — the same type famous for its use on D-Day in 1944 — is the latest object to emerge from the declining waters of Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
The latest revelation from Lake Mead's receding waters is a World War II-era landing craft known as a"Higgins boat," a mostly-plywood vessel based on American swamp boats. More than 23,000 Higgins boats were built during the 1940s for the U.S. and Allied militaries, to carry soldiers and fighting vehicles from ships to shore, according to Stanford University .
The vessel was then used in surveys of the Colorado River, but it was later sold to a marina at Lake Mead; eventually, it was deliberately sunk to anchor a breakwater — an offshore structure built to protect a marine area from waves — at a depth of nearly 185 feet . Boatbuilder Andrew Higgins of New Orleans designed the Higgins boat in the late 1930s for the U.S. military, using innovations he'd developed for swamp boats.
Measurements by US Bureau of Reclamation show that the water in Lake Mead reached its highest point of about 1,220 feet above sea level in 1941, 1983 and 1997, but fell by up to 200 feet in the periods between those dates. Geophysicist Richard Seager of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York told Live Science that the decades-long drought at Lake Mead is mainly the result of a persistent"cold phase" in weather of the tropical Pacific Ocean region that causes relatively dry conditions over the Southwest of the United States.
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